Trump to clarify the details of the new restrictions on asylum seekers

Citing a "overwhelmed" asylum system, Donald Trump should provide details as early as Friday morning on new and aggressive restrictions to banish many migrants crossing the US from Mexico and seek asylum – a move that faces immediate legal challenges.

Late Thursday afternoon, the Trump administration announced new restrictions on asylum seekers on the Mexican border, in a move that according to experts violated immigration laws.

The new regulation states that people can apply for asylum along the US-Mexico border only in official ports of entry.

Trump will soon announce which countries are affected by the crackdown, which the government considers an emergency measure, but presents itself before the president's hostile rhetoric, where he has repeatedly described the desperate Central American Americans fleeing from places degraded by poverty and from violence to seek help from the United States as an "invasion".

However, the Immigration and Nationality Act states very clearly that anyone can apply for asylum regardless of whether they are in a designated destination port, "said Tom Jawetz, vice president for immigration policy at the Center for American Progress.

The Trump administration has a history of proclaiming the restrictions of illegal immigration that are then thrown into court, starting with multiple travel bans that the White House has attempted to impose shortly after the Trump settlement. . A limited and temporary version of Trump's travel ban has been authorized to enter into force.

"In its run to block asylum seekers, the administration is trying to put an end to the law," said Beth Werlin, executive director of the American Immigration Council. "Congress has spoken plainly: Individuals are not required to seek asylum in a port of entry, any person in the United States must have access to the asylum procedure."

Motivated by the sense of moral purpose and in accordance with the international norms established after the Second World War, the United States accepts asylum seekers who fear persecution in their countries of origin due to race, religion, nationality, belonging to a particular social group or political opinion.

Just under 40,000 asylum applications in the United States were made by Mexicans and Central Americans in the five fiscal years from 2011 to 2016, while about 35,000 came from China, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (Trac), a collection organization data at the University of Syracuse.

The rate of rejection of more than 80% for Mexican and Central American asylum seekers is much higher, however, than the rate of rejection for Chinese asylum seekers, equal to 22%. Trac figures indicate that a couple of hundreds of Mexicans are granted US asylum each year.

But if Trump's new regulations seemed badly equipped to ease the pressure on the "overwhelmed" US asylum system, they could serve the purpose of linking Trump's political identity even more closely to Americans' concerns about Central America and Mexico.

In the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections, Trump raised the alarm about an "invasion" of immigrants from the south and even deployed the US military to the border – in an operation that the administration and the media have completely abandoned after the elections.

"While the administration clearly felt the urgent need to politicize the situation of a group of people – mostly mothers and children – traveling slowly through Mexico before the mid-term elections on Tuesday, which it hardly provides the urgency needed to justify the implementation of this cruel policy without first hearing from the public, "said Jawetz.

"With the Trump administration, it is worth mentioning that even if they embrace defamation and anti-immigration biases for their perceived political benefits, they are also committed to promoting an anti-immigration and anti-refugee program every single day."

Trump's new policy was signed by national security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, the principal apologist for Trump's policy on family separations at the border, and by the attorney general in charge, Matthew Whitaker, whose appointment for Wednesday is been judged clearly illegal by John Yoo, who invented the legal argument of the George W Bush administration for torture.